1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to a computerized teaching system, and in particular to a computerized interactive group communication system including remote teaching.
2. Description of Related Art
The present invention is applicable to both the field of education and to group decision-making. It will therefore be generally understood that the terms "teacher" and "group leader" as used herein are interchangeable, and that the terms "student" and "participant" as used herein are also interchangeable.
Existing computer-based networks that are used in a classroom in a school, or for group decision making, are one of two types: Independent Mode and Social Mode.
Independent Mode refers to a design that allows students to interact with a program at their own pace. One example of an Independent Mode network is the PLATO.TM. system provided by Control Data Corporation.
Social Mode refers to a design that allows many students to respond simultaneously to a question posed by a teacher.
A prior system which can be used either in Social Mode or in Independent Mode is the Discourse System, which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,641,685, issued Feb. 15, 1972, to J. Zawels et al., which patent is incorporated by reference herein.
Independent Mode systems rely on a stored lesson program which includes explanatory material, questions and the correct answers to the questions. Accordingly, depending on the responses of students, feedback information can be given automatically to a student as to the correctness of his/her response and the score can be obtained automatically at the end of a lesson indicating how many responses each student answered correctly.
Social mode systems can also rely on pre-programmed correct answers. The explanatory material and the questions however may be either also pre-programmed or may be stated verbally by the teacher. Where a pre-programmed correct answer is available feedback information can be given to a student as to the correctness of a response and the score may also be allocated here for each student at the end of a lesson. If the explanatory material and questions are preprogrammed the teacher may cause these to be displayed either on the student terminals or on a central monitor which is referred to as a Public Display.
A lesson program comprises a multiplicity of numbered frames. Each frame may contain one or more answers to a question, relevant explanatory material and the relevant question to be asked. A frame which does not have such information is referred to as an empty frame.
The explanatory material may also be in the form of Audio Visual (A-V) devices which are actuated automatically from information stored within each frame.
In both Social Mode and Independent Mode a programmed lesson is normally constructed by the teacher or a programmer before a lesson is given. It is a relatively time consuming operation.
In the case of lessons with pre-programmed lessons it is important to indicate to a student as soon as possible the correctness of his/her response. This feedback in the case of a correct response is referred to as an reinforcement. The speed with which this feedback is given to a student is particularly critical were the frame is programmed to give letter-by-letter reinforcement, i.e. where it is intended that with every character of a student's response, reinforcement be given to indicate whether the student is on the right track. This is because a student's typing speed should not be impeded by the student having to wait for possible reinforcement on each keystroke.
A further feature, particularly in Social Mode, is that the teacher is able to see on the teacher's screen the responses of a large number of students simultaneously with the students typing their responses.
A further feature is that the teacher is able to display one or more of these responses to the whole class for the purpose of discussion. This is best done on the Public Display, e.g. an LCD overlay for an overhead projector or a large monitor which can be viewed by all the participants.
A further feature is that an immediate readout is available on the teacher's screen giving a statistical summary as to the number of students who are correct, who are wrong and who haven't responded, as well as an indication next to each student's name, response and seat number as to the correctness of the response.
Because of the time consuming effort to produce preprogrammed lessons there is a need to be able to obtain a score on the performance of the students, and even provide feedback information to the students, even if correct answers have not been pre-programmed. Indeed, such a facility would permit spontaneous teaching and evaluation in Social Mode without any pre-programming.
There is also a need for a teacher to be able to ask spontaneous questions and to use the responses from one group of students to construct the frames of a lesson which can be used at a later time to teach the same or another group of students. This need arises where the responses of students may be in the form of either correct responses, explanatory material or questions posed by the students. This is in contrast to conventional pre-programmed lessons where the teacher must be able to anticipate all possible responses and all possible questions that could be posed by the student.
There is also a need in the field of remote teaching for accessing large numbers of students who may be located in different learning centers spread over a large geographical area, where each learning center contains a multiplicity of students. For such a system to operate in Social Mode many operational as well as cost problems must be overcome.
The system must ideally behave as if all the students are in the same room with the teacher. Thus the teacher must be able to see on the teacher's screen at the Teacher's Center, a large number of responses simultaneously from the Learning Centers as the responses are being answered.
The teacher must be able to display any one or more responses simultaneously to all the students.
Also the teacher must be able to obtain immediately integrated statistics on the performance of all the students in the various centers in order to know if a question is understood and whether material must be retaught.
The students at the remote sites must have the full benefit of any audio-visual devices actuated by the teacher, even if only a telephone link is available.
While providing all the above functions the speed with which each student receives reinforcement must not be impaired. In other words, frames programmed with answers that are intended to supply letter-by-letter reinforcement must still be possible irrespective of the typing speed of a student, the number of students on the system, or the geographical location of the student. If a modem and telephone line were to be provided for each student, the system would become costly, complex and unreliable. The expense would be not only for the hardware which needs to be duplicated for each student, but the communication costs become prohibitively expensive since in essence, one is placing a separate long distance telephone call between the teacher and each student for the duration of the teaching period.
Whatever the merits of prior computerized teaching systems, they do not achieve the benefits of the present invention.